Chapter 8 The Man Magnet’s Osechi #4
“You seem to know a lot about how a man’s mind works.
So why didn’t it work out with Fujimoto-kun?
” I asked Shiori-chan, who was arranging the chikuzenni on the table after warming it up in the microwave.
She had all this expertise about men. I was completely baffled as to why she couldn’t make it work with this one guy.
“I’m not sure why. I hadn’t even planned to fall for him in the first place. He wasn’t my type at all. Normally, I have super-high dating standards, so I never imagined going for a twenty-seven-year-old chronic job-quitter chasing his dreams to become a photographer.”
She told us that Fujimoto-kun was a perfectionist, and whenever they did a shoot together, he criticized every little thing, from how she used the equipment and how she communicated with the models, to her composition and lighting.
“God, I hated him. He kept saying stuff like my work was too repetitive and that I should give more posing instructions to models. I would be like, Shut up! Let me do things my way! You know? We were constantly at each other’s throats.”
“And yet you eventually fell for him.” Iori snickered.
I was baffled. “Didn’t you use your techniques on him?”
“That’s the thing. I did, but it didn’t work!
” Shiori-chan said, as she dished out the osechi for all of us.
“My techniques had no effect on him whatsoever. I’d never met anyone like him.
I later found out that Fujimoto-kun had a difficult relationship with his family and he’d practically cut all ties with them.
He’d been living a solitary life with no one to depend on.
I guess he wasn’t used to getting close with people. ”
She placed a beautifully plated selection of osechi in front of me.
“Oh, please help yourselves.”
There was kuri kinton, datemaki rolled omelet, and herring roe, as well as braised pork belly. She must have had to work around the clock to make them.
A faint scent of ginger rose up from the braised pork belly, which was so tender it fell right apart inside my mouth. The succulent cubes of meat were soaked in the rich flavor of the sauce.
“So how did you go from hating him to falling in love with him?” I asked.
“Our mentor—the photographer I was interning for—decided to hold an exhibition. The two of us were put in charge of running it, forcing us to collaborate. We had to spend all day every day together as we prepared, and we gradually found ourselves working seamlessly with each other.”
Shiori-chan sampled the herring roe after deftly using her chopsticks to cut off a small piece.
“I lived far from the office, so Fujimoto-kun let me store my things at his house. Plus, he owned lots of photography equipment, so I started stopping at his place to work quite regularly. We often practiced shooting together, too. I think that went on for about six months.”
I took a sip of my beer to compose myself. I was starting to get butterflies in my stomach.
“Did you end up being…friends with benefits?” I asked tentatively.
Shiori-chan pulled a face and sighed. “The opposite of that.”
“The opposite?”
“Nothing happened. For six whole months. Even though I was doing sleepovers at his place, nothing ever happened.”
“What? Are you telling me that a man and a woman in their twenties did sleepovers for six months and nothing ever happened? Well…I guess it’s possible if one of you was sleeping on the floor.”
“We slept side by side on a single bed.”
“No!”
The muscles in my cheeks were getting sore from sitting with my mouth wide open.
“After work, we’d have dinner together, then edit photos and do some file processing before sliding into bed and sleeping like logs.
The next day, we’d go to the office again and work.
Day after day, it was the same thing,” Shiori-chan explained as she chewed on the decoratively cut shiitake mushroom.
“I didn’t know what he was thinking. I was perplexed.
As colleagues, we got along well—he was my comrade.
I definitely felt comfortable in his company, and I was pretty sure that Fujimoto-kun trusted me, too.
But he didn’t make a single move. I started wondering if he didn’t see me that way, and it outraged me.
I mean, how could a guy be with me, Shiori Fukami, all day every day, and not fall for me? ”
“If only I had half your confidence.”
If I was in her situation, I would have been so disheartened.
“So I thought, If I’m gonna do this, I gotta go all in.” Swallowing her shiitake mushroom, Shiori-chan smiled mischievously.
“G-go all in? What did you do?”
“I jumped into his bed butt naked.”
Hozumi started to cough violently.
“Are you okay?” I asked, quickly handing him a glass of water.
“Yes,” Hozumi said, still coughing. “Sorry, I hadn’t expected her tactic to be so…physical.”
“What else was I supposed to do? It was my last resort. Every technique that had previously worked in my life as a Man Magnet had failed. I’d played all my cards. I thought, This is my last chance. If this doesn’t work, I’m going to give up. So I literally threw myself at him naked.”
Hozumi started coughing again.
“Was your tactic successful?” Iori swirled his now-empty can of beer.
“Well…kind of.” Shiori-chan tilted her head ambiguously.
“What do you mean, ‘kind of’?”
“Did you have sex?” Iori asked bluntly, and Shiori-chan gave a slightly awkward nod.
“But after that, nothing else changed. He didn’t say he liked me or ask me to be his girlfriend.
We carried on living as normal—we worked together, helped each other out during shoots.
We had dinner together at least once every three days.
It was the same old routine, except we were now having sex. ”
“So, then, you were…”
Were they lovers? Was it just sex? No, they were always together, like they were best friends, so it wasn’t just sex.
I scanned the sumptuous assortment of osechi spread across the table. “You must have spent New Year’s together every year.”
“Yeah. The last three years have been the same. We would hike up a mountain overnight and get some shots of the first sunrise, then go home and pass out. We’d wake up around noon and have some osechi under the cozy kotatsu.”
She continued, “I spent all the seasonal occasions with him. In the spring, we took our cameras to Shinjuku Gyoen for the cherry blossoms, and in the summer, we took shots of the sunset at sea. In the autumn, we traveled to Kyoto to catch the colored maple leaves. Although it wasn’t all that romantic, to be honest. I mean, we were carrying loads of equipment with us.
Tripod, strobe, umbrella…that stuff weighs a ton, you know? But even still…”
Shiori-chan looked a little lonesome as she gazed at the snowflakes quietly settling on the ground.
“It was fun. I had so much fun when I was with Fujimoto-kun.”
She explained that although it was never explicitly mentioned that they were a couple, being together became the norm, and that relationship continued until yesterday.
But she always felt there was some kind of barrier between her and Fujimoto-kun, like a thin layer of film that she couldn’t seem to break no matter what.
Announcing that she couldn’t carry the conversation any further in her sober state, Shiori-chan demanded that Iori bring her some tequila.
Iori and I agreed to join her in drinking shots, and I felt a wave of nausea at the glug of amber liquid poured in front of me. As I drew my nose to it, its heady smell rose up through my nostrils.
“Ready? Go!”
Throwing our heads back, we downed the shots and bit into the lemon slices in unison. My head was spinning. Shiori-chan screwed up her face and fanned at her warmed cheeks.
“I proposed to Fujimoto-kun, you know,” Shiori-chan said. Her tone was so matter-of-fact that I almost missed what she’d said.
She didn’t just say that, did she?
“You proposed?”
Shiori-chan chased her tequila with her whiskey highball now diluted with melting ice. I noticed that the skin around her eyelids had turned a little red.
“Once, we got a big cake for my birthday. Fujimoto-kun took a shot of me and the cake. Although the room was in a big mess and I didn’t have makeup on, and I was wearing embarrassingly childish hair clips, the picture turned out great.
We were like, Look at that face! and started laughing our heads off.
And then…” Reminiscing, Shiori-chan chuckled.
“I thought, I love him so much! and I just blurted out, ‘Marry me!’ ”
Shiori-chan laughed to herself, scratching her head sheepishly. “Love makes you a bit crazy doesn’t it?”
Iori leaned forward. “And what did he say?”
Shiori-chan’s eyes dropped. “He told me he was scared. That he was scared to be with me.” She stared idly at the table.
“He said that he felt like he would be ruined if he were to stay with me. I didn’t understand.
We were having so much fun—how dare he say that he was scared?
We ended up having a huge fight, and we didn’t see each other for a while.
Just thinking about it pisses me off,” Shiori-chan said, and downed another shot of tequila.
She bit into a slice of lemon and exhaled heavily.
“I was so pissed off, I even thought about dating other guys. But then I thought, Why would I go out of my way to date other guys, when Fujimoto-kun was right there? I was furious, yet I was already missing him. It was at that moment…”
Shiori-chan stopped speaking for a minute.
“It was at that moment that I realized I may never love someone the way I loved him. I thought, I love Fujimoto-kun. I don’t care if he’s awkward and picky and oversensitive.
I don’t care if he’s ‘desirable,’ and I don’t care what other people think.
I just love him. I decided to simply keep loving him, and see how far that would take me. ”
“Wow,” I said.
Have I ever felt that way about someone?